B2B Application Integration: e-Business-Enable Your Enterprise

Making business applications communicate across corporate boundaries can be complicated, which is why system architects usually coordinate such projects. B2B Application Integration explains some of the approaches these system architects can take to get application A to talk to database B and Web site C, without simultaneously allowing hacker yahoos in for a look around. David Linthicum surveys technologies generally, and also the products that implement them. He's a fine teacher, able to clarify complicated processes with words and illustrations. He's also well informed enough to express and support opinions on how various technologies are limited, which products live up to their claims, and how to implement specific mechanisms for application integration.

In a typical section on an application integration technology, the book introduces terms and explains the relationships among the pieces of the technology. Block diagrams and flow charts show which pieces talk to which others. Where appropriate, competing technologies are explained side by side--for example, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). There's very little code included, other than the barest examples for illustrative purposes. This is a book for architects and planners, not implementers. As such, it's an excellent survey of software integration technologies. --David Wall

Topics covered:

• Tools for making different applications and database management systems speak to one another, within and across corporate borders
• Various approaches to the integration problem (data integration, business process integration, and so on)
• Middleware
• Remote procedure calls (RPC)
• Message queuing
• Extensible Markup Language (XML)
• RosettaNet
• Microsoft BizTalk
• Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)